White Army in the context of "Nestor Makhno"

The Russian Civil War (Russian: Гражданская война в России, romanized: Grazhdanskaya voyna v Rossii) was a multi-party civil war in the former Russian Empire sparked by the 1917 overthrowing of the Russian Provisional Government in the October Revolution, as many factions vied to determine Russia's political future. It resulted in the formation of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic and later the Soviet Union in most of its territory. Its finale marked the end of the Russian Revolution, which was one of the key events of the 20th century.

The Russian monarchy ended with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II during the February Revolution, and Russia was in a state of political flux. A tense summer culminated in the October Revolution, where the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government of the new Russian Republic. Bolshevik seizure of power was not universally accepted, and the country descended into a conflict which became a full-scale civil war in May–June 1918. The two largest combatants were the Red Army, fighting for the establishment of a Bolshevik-led socialist state headed by Vladimir Lenin, and the forces known as the White movement (and its White Army), led mainly by the right-leaning officers of the Russian Empire, united around the figure of Alexander Kolchak. In addition, rival militant socialists, notably the Ukrainian anarchists of the Makhnovshchina and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, were involved in conflict against the Bolsheviks. They, as well as non-ideological green armies, opposed the Bolsheviks, the Whites and the foreign interventionists. Thirteen foreign states intervened against the Red Army, notably the Allied intervention, whose primary goal was re-establishing the Eastern Front of World War I. Three foreign states of the Central Powers also intervened, rivaling the Allied intervention with the main goal of retaining the territory they had received in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Soviet Russia.

The White movement, also known as the Whites, was one of the main factions of the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922. It was led mainly by the right-wing and conservative officers of the Russian Empire, while the Bolsheviks who led the October Revolution in Russia, also known as the Reds, and their supporters, were regarded as the main enemies of the Whites. It operated as a system of governments and administrations united as the Russian State, which functioned as a military dictatorship throughout the most of its existence, and military formations collectively referred to as the White Army, or the White Guard.

Although the White movement included a variety of political opinions in Russia opposed to the Bolsheviks, from the republican-minded liberals through monarchists to the ultra-nationalist Black Hundreds, and lacked a universally-accepted doctrine, the main force behind the movement were the conservative officers, and the resulting movement shared many traits with widespread right-wing counter-revolutionary movements of the time, namely nationalism, racism, distrust of liberal and democratic politics, clericalism, contempt for the common man and dislike of industrial civilization; in November 1918, the movement united on an authoritarian-right platform around the figure of Alexander Kolchak as its principal leader. It generally defended the order of pre-revolutionary Imperial Russia, although the ideal of the movement was a mythical "Holy Russia", what was a mark of its religious understanding of the world. The positive program of the movement was largely summarized in the slogan of "united and indivisible Russia [ru]" which meant the restoration of imperial state borders, and its denial of the right to self-determination. The Whites are associated with pogroms and antisemitism; while the relations with the Jews featured a certain complexity, the movement was largely antisemitic, with the White generals viewing the Revolution as a result of a Jewish conspiracy. Antisemitism and more broad nationalism and xenophobia of the movement were manifested in the acts of the White Terror, which often targeted non-Russian ethnic groups of the former Russian Empire.

The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, often referred by its shortened name as the Red Army, was the army and air force of the Russian Soviet Republic and, from 1922, the Soviet Union. The army was established in January 1918 by a decree of the Council of People's Commissars to oppose the military forces of the new nation's adversaries during the Russian Civil War, especially the various groups collectively known as the White Army. In February 1946, the Red Army (which embodied the main component of the Soviet Armed Forces alongside the Soviet Navy) was renamed the "Soviet Army". Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union it was split between the post-Soviet states, with its bulk becoming the Russian Ground Forces, commonly considered to be the successor of the Soviet Army.

The Red Army provided the largest ground force in the Allied victory in the European theatre of World War II, and its invasion of Manchuria assisted the unconditional surrender of Japan. During its operations on the Eastern Front, it accounted for 75–80% of the casualties that the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS suffered during the war, and ultimately captured the German capital, Berlin.

Volgograd, formerly Tsaritsyn (1589–1925) and Stalingrad (1925–1961), is the largest city and the administrative centre of Volgograd Oblast, Russia. The city lies on the western bank of the Volga, covering an area of 859.4 square kilometres (331.8 square miles), with a population of slightly over one million residents. Volgograd is the 16th-largest city by population size in Russia, the third-largest city of the Southern Federal District, and the fourth-largest city on the Volga.

The city was founded as the fortress of Tsaritsyn in 1589. By the 19th century, Tsaritsyn had become an important river-port and commercial centre, leading to its rapid population growth. In November 1917, at the start of the Russian Civil War, Tsaritsyn came under Bolshevik control. It fell briefly to the White Army in mid-1919 but returned to Bolshevik control in January 1920. In 1925, the city was renamed Stalingrad in honor of Joseph Stalin, who took part in defending the city against the White Army who had then ruled the country. During World War II, Axis forces attacked the city, leading to the Battle of Stalingrad, the largest and bloodiest battle in World War II, from which it received the title of Hero City. The Soviet victory at Stalingrad is widely held to be the turning point of World War II, leading to the destruction of the German army in the East. In 1961, Nikita Khrushchev's administration renamed the city to Volgograd as part of de-Stalinization.

The Ukrainian–Soviet War (Ukrainian: українсько-радянська війна, romanized: ukrainsko-radianska viina) is the term commonly used in post-Soviet Ukraine for the events taking place between 1917 and 1921, nowadays regarded essentially as a war between the Ukrainian People's Republic and the Bolsheviks (Russian SFSR and Ukrainian SSR). The war ensued soon after the October Revolution when Lenin dispatched Antonov's expeditionary group to Ukraine and Southern Russia.

Soviet historiography viewed the Bolshevik victory as the liberation of Ukraine from occupation by the armies of Western and Central Europe (including that of Poland). Conversely, modern Ukrainian historians consider it a failed war of independence by the Ukrainian People's Republic against the Bolsheviks. The conflict was complicated by the involvement of the Revolutionary Insurgent Army of Ukraine, non-Bolshevik Russians of the White Army, and the armies of the Second Polish Republic, Austria-Hungary, and the German Empire, among others.

Vladivostok (/ˌvlædɪˈvɒstɒk/ VLAD-iv-OST-ok; Russian: Владивосток, lit. '"Ruler of the East"', IPA: [vlədʲɪvɐˈstok] ) is the largest city and the administrative center of Primorsky Krai and the capital of the Far Eastern Federal District of Russia. It is located around the Golden Horn Bay on the Sea of Japan, covering an area of 331.16 square kilometers (127.86 square miles), with a population of 603,519 residents as of 2021. Vladivostok is the second-largest city in the Far Eastern Federal District, as well as the Russian Far East, after Khabarovsk. It is located approximately 45 kilometers (28 mi) from the China–Russia border and 134 kilometers (83 mi) from the North Korea–Russia border.

Vladivostok was historically part of Outer Manchuria. Shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Aigun between Qing China and the Russian Empire and affirmed by the Convention of Peking – from which it is also known as the Amur Annexation – the city was founded as a Russian military outpost on July 2, 1860. In 1872, the main Russian naval base on the Pacific Ocean was transferred to the city, stimulating its growth. In 1914 the city experienced rapid growth economically and ethnically diverse with population exceeding over 100,000 inhabitants with slightly less than half of the population being Russians. During this time, large Asian communities developed in the city. The public life of the city flourished; many public associations were created, from charities to hobby groups. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1917, Vladivostok was occupied in 1918 by White Russian and Allied forces, the last of whom, from the Japanese Empire, were not withdrawn until 1922 as part of its wider intervention in Siberia; by that time the antirevolutionary White Army forces had collapsed. That same year, the Red Army occupied the city, absorbing the Far Eastern Republic into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the city became a part of the Russian Federation.

The Battle of Tsaritsyn was a military confrontation between the Red Army and the White Army during the Russian Civil War for control of Tsaritsyn (now Volgograd), a significant city and port on the Volga River in southwestern Russia.

The city, which had been an important center of support for the October Revolution and remained in the hands of the Reds, was besieged three times by anti-Bolshevik Don Cossacks under the command of Pyotr Krasnov: July–September 1918, September–October 1918, and January–February 1919. Another attempt to conquer Tsaritsyn was made in May–June 1919 by the Volunteer Army, which successfully captured the city. In turn, between August 1919 and January 1920, the Whites defended the city against the Bolsheviks. Tsaritsyn was finally conquered by the Reds in early 1920.

The Russian State was a White Army anti-Bolshevik state proclaimed by the Act of the Ufa State Conference of September 23, 1918 (the Constitution of the Provisional All-Russian Government), "On the formation of the all-Russian supreme power" in the name of "restoring state unity and independence of Russia" affected by the revolutionary events of 1917, the October Revolution and the signing of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany.